Final Fantasy XI launched in Japan yesterday, and many people rushed to be the first to get online, including our close friend, Andrew Church. The following is a timeline of his Final Fantasy XI experience in his own words.

5/16 10:00

My local game store opens, and I immediately pick up my reserved copy of FFXI, 300-page instruction book and all.

5/16 11:30

Installation to hard disk of the PlayOnline viewer and FFXI completes. (Not too bad, given that FFXI probably has a huge amount of data.)

5/16 12:00

Official launch of FFXI; i.e. Square finally connects the servers up to the Internet. I, of course, immediately go into the account creation screen.

5/16 12:15

Account creation completes. Note that this consisted of about 2 minutes of entering data and 13 minutes of waiting for the server.

5/16 12:20

I start up FFXI and go into the "content ID" purchase screen. (A "content ID" is basically a slot that you can create an FFXI character in. This is the thing that costs 1280 yen per month.)

5/16 13:10

Content ID creation finishes. Note that this consisted of about 30 seconds of selecting options, 45 minutes of waiting, and 4 minutes 30 seconds of clicking "retry" on the "network timeout error" dialog.

5/16 18:00

A friend gets home from work and starts the registration process.

5/16 19:00

I go back to the content ID purchase screen to make an extra character slot.

5/16 19:40

I click "Buy" and the server comes back with "Error, try again."

5/16 20:00

Deja vu on the error screen. I give up and go back to FFXI-- only to discover that I now have 3 character slots. No word from Square yet to my request to delete one and cancel the charges for it.

5/17 01:00

The friend finally completes the registration process.

5/17 02:00

All PlayOnline/FFXI servers die suddenly, with no warning.

All times are Japan Standard Time (+0900)

At the time of this story, it is just after 1AM, May 18th in Tokyo. The Final Fantasy XI servers are still down, and will be until Square relaunches in about eight hours from now. The PlayOnline website also experienced problems during this time frame. We will bring you more details and hopefully some impressions when the game relaunches later today.